Jurisdiction over Corporate Officers and the Incoherence of Implied Consent

45 Pages Posted: 23 May 2012 Last revised: 14 Jan 2016

See all articles by Verity Winship

Verity Winship

University of Illinois College of Law

Date Written: May 22, 2012

Abstract

Corporate officers of most large corporations in the United States have little contact with the state of incorporation — usually Delaware — beyond the bare fact of being a corporate officer. Jurisdiction in that state’s courts thus depends on whether the position alone provides constitutionally significant minimum contacts with the state. This article argues that implied consent is an incoherent basis for personal jurisdiction over corporate officers, and is the first to identify and analyze Delaware’s widespread use of implied consent statutes for corporate and non-corporate business entities. Not only is consent ultimately irrelevant, but jurisdiction over non-resident corporate officers based only on their corporate position is of uneasy constitutionality. This article evaluates a solution to this problem: a movement from implied to express consent.

The article also contributes to two current debates in corporate law. Courts and commentators have recently turned their attention to corporate officers, but they have ignored a necessary first step in the analysis, which this article provides. Without personal jurisdiction over officers, state courts cannot even begin to develop the law about their duties or protections. Moreover, the article fills a gap in the debate over how Delaware can keep its corporate law cases in its courts. It argues that implied consent statutes are designed to ensure that Delaware business law is adjudicated in Delaware, and that the constitutional due process limits analyzed here are an important obstacle to Delaware’s attempts to bundle its corporate law and forum.

Keywords: corporate law, Delaware, personal jurisdiction, due process, corporate officer, board of directors, implied consent

JEL Classification: K40, K41, K22, H77

Suggested Citation

Winship, Verity, Jurisdiction over Corporate Officers and the Incoherence of Implied Consent (May 22, 2012). 2013 U. of Ill. L. Rev. 1171, Illinois Public Law Research Paper No. 11-22, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2064952

Verity Winship (Contact Author)

University of Illinois College of Law ( email )

504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820
United States
217-244-8161 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/faculty-profiles/verity-winship/

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
299
Abstract Views
2,893
Rank
185,544
PlumX Metrics